Distance Zero

Rostom Street, Garden City, the first of February 2026. Dina is a 34-year-old dentist sorting out the study of her father, a physicist, 18 days after his death. Her brother Akram walks in circles with the phone at his ear: we sell the flat, and the books go to whoever buys them by the kilo. Then the last row of books comes down, and a small green light appears in the wall. A grey metal box, with a dial marked with three positions, a button, a small screen and a faded red number. Its cable has been in the wall for 30 years. That night Dina opens the locked drawer and finds a note in her father's hand: the twin of this device is with Oweis Gad in Imbaba. Do not switch it off. And do not read it alone.

Dina calls the number, and a young man answers: Oweis died 7 years ago. When she says her father's name, he hangs up. This is Nagy, Oweis's son, who works on a ferry on the Nile by day and in his father's workshop by night. On the water he tells her that her father took what belonged to his. Together, the two devices hold a secret key to a message the father left behind, and neither can read it alone. Every press of the button uses up something that never comes back, and every mistake erases a letter forever. Akram wants to sell the device, the power keeps failing in Imbaba, and the generator bill keeps growing. Will Dina cross the river and hear things about her father she does not want to hear?

Behind the story is a real phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Imagine two coins flipped in two cities that land on the same face every single time. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and did not believe it; then experiments proved it, and 3 scientists won the Nobel Prize for it in 2022. Entanglement cannot send a single word: the numbers are random, and no one knows they match until they compare. But it can make a key that cannot be stolen, and anyone who spies gives himself away, like a wax seal you cannot read under without breaking it. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.